Backup Services Require More Than 'Set and Forget'

There's a huge mindset out there that once you have a backup in place you can forget about it. For a startling 23.8% of companies surveyed across multiple industries that have never once checked their backup system, a rude awakening is likely in store.

"We see hedge funds with no clue what they need to do, just that they need a solution that puts them in compliance," says Jennifer Walzer, CEO of BUMI (Back Up My Info), a provider of managed online backup, recovery and compliance solutions for mid-sized businesses.

The chance that a server is eventually going to crash is about 100%, Walzer says. Firms may try to prepare with a recovery plan and a software to back it up, but nobody is monitoring it everyday. It's understandable, she adds, firms have so much to deal with, neither the executives nor their IT staff want to be distracted from other projects.

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"Financial services understand this from a different perspective than than companies in other industries," she adds. “They take on a growing volume of data every day, even a week or month without backups is going to put a firm into a tailspin when they go to report up to the SEC because there's a multitude of compliance issues that can follow suit."

According to BUMI's Q2 2012 data backup survey, almost one-third of respondent feel business continually are the most important initiatives for backing up data. Twenty percent believe disaster recovery is most important, and another 20 percent selected compliance.

According to their Monday press release, BUMI’s 150-plus financial services clients and a "growing roster of hedge funds" utilize BUMI to address business-critical data backup and recovery, security and compliance initiatives.

“Today’s financial services companies are managing exponentially growing volumes of data, and the need to protect investor information from outages, human error, theft, and disasters has never been so vital,” said Walzer in the release. “In addition to backup and recovery, organizations need to adhere to SEC 17a-4, Dodd Frank, Sarbanes Oxley, Gramm-Leach-Bliley and other regulations that dictate how financial data is managed. This is a very important piece of the backup and recovery equation that adds complexity and cannot be overlooked.” Becca Lipman is Senior Editor for Wall Street & Technology. She writes in-depth news articles with a focus on big data and compliance in the capital markets. She regularly meets with information technology leaders and innovators and writes about cloud computing, datacenters, ... View Full Bio